Introduction

September 11, Jacques Derrida observed, had by October 2001 already become "a date or a dating that has taken over our public space and our private lives." The very process of naming transformed the attacks of the previous month into "an event that truly marks, that truly makes its mark, a singular and . . . unprecedented event."¹

Ten years later, the terrain has changed. It is harder now simply to repeat the mantra "9/11," like a recurring nightmare or a conjuring spell, "over and over again as if its singularity were so absolute that it could not be matched."² Two important recent books on the impact of September 11 on film and popular culture—Stephen Prince's Firestorm and Jeff Birkenstein, Anna Froula, and Karen Randell's Reframing 9/11—demonstrate even in their subtitles that the single date is no longer enough to capture the complexity of the United States' relationship with terror over the past decade, and that the black-and-white signifier of "9/11," its digits so neatly recalling both the phone number for US emergency services and the formerly standing towers, is no longer enough to contain all the ethically gray areas within and around that opposition.³ Prince's volume covers not just 9/11 but "American Film in the Age of Terrorism," while Reframing 9/11 repositions the once-monumental, singular date in broader terms of "Film, Popular Culture and the 'War on Terror.'" From the cover onward, those quotation marks around "war on terror" retain a skeptical distance from the Bush administration's attempt to narrate and justify its actions in terms of military urgency.

It is now difficult, and rightly so, to talk of 9/11 as a singular, monumental, unprecedented, and unmatchable event—an event so unique and unnameable that it lies beyond words and can only be gestured to through numbers. Prince declares in his opening pages that he will study not just the attacks on the United States in 2001 but their "legacy—the Iraq War, controversies over warrantless domestic surveillance, forcible rendition, Abu Ghraib and policies of torture—how did American film respond to and portray these issues?"⁴ Reza Aslan's foreword to Reframing 9/11, similarly, argues that the "simple story of us versus them has become muddled. Wiretapping. Waterboarding. Constitutional violations. The narrative that Americans constructed to help make sense of 9/11 no longer seems as straightforward and uncomplicated as it so often does in the movies."⁵

From these opening gambits, both volumes introduce a third factor into the dynamic. They will explore not just the relationship between the swift, shocking horror of the 2001 attacks and the United States' more sustained, but arguably no less brutal, response, but also the relationship between this contemporary cultural territory and the stories it tells about terror: the relationship between the horrific theater of September 11 (which so many observers described as feeling "like a movie"⁶), the official and unofficial narratives of the subsequent "war," and the popular fictions that articulate, reflect, negotiate, and even inform these real-world events.

That relationship is, as may already be clear, equally complex and open to debate. Prince presents it in terms of cinema's response to political issues: he describes the "imprinting of the post-9/11 world onto American film," the "absorbing" of "9/11 into existing story conventions," and the ways in which a TV show "translates into popular culture the political stance of the Bush administration."⁷ The implied model is of popular narrative as a willing, receptive medium, a cultural Silly Putty onto which real-world events transfer themselves. Aslan suggests a politically loaded process of transference, arguing that popular narratives translate and simplify to serve the dominant interests: "[I]t was cinema, and popular culture in general, that . . . helped cast the disturbing events of 9/11, and the even more disturbing events that followed, into an easily accessible, easily digestible story, one in which everyone had a role to play, as either hero or villain, good or evil, 'with us' or 'against us.'"⁸

Yet other accounts suggest a two-way dynamic...